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(HealthNewsDigest.com)-A medical revolution is using innovative biotechnology to enhance understanding of some of the most complex diseases and how they develop. It is also providing doctors with new and better tools for diagnosing and treating conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
The revolution involves substances called biologics. These medicines are made from living matter, as opposed to the chemical compounds of traditional pharmaceuticals. They are already available to treat or help prevent heart attacks, breast cancer and diabetes, to name a few. In fact, new biologics are among the more than 600 biotech drugs currently in various stages of clinical development to treat a wide range of diseases.
“The biotechnology revolution is helping create medicines that use unprecedented technologies, such as nano-sized particles that seek out and target cancer cells, ways to actually regenerate healthy muscle to replace damaged heart tissue, and gene therapy,” said Billy Tauzin, president and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). “Such critical innovation is creating medicines with the potential to help millions of patients live longer, healthier and more productive lives.”
While biologics are expensive to discover and produce in large quantities, they can also help to save money in the long run. Delaying the onset or slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease by just five years, for example, could save $100 billion per year in Medicare and Medicaid costs alone by 2020.
Currently, American biopharmaceutical companies dominate the field. In fact, as of 2007, U.S. biopharmaceutical companies accounted for 82 percent of global biotech research and development.
Creating new biologics is a difficult and costly endeavor. It can cost as much as $1.2 billion to research and develop a new biologic medicine and take anywhere from 10 to 15 years to get FDA approval for a successful new medicine-not including the time and expense of building specialized manufacturing facilities, which can cost as much as $250 to $450 million or more.
For more information on biologics and new medicines now being researched and developed by America’s pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, visit www.phrma.org.
To learn more about how innovative medicines are created, visit www.innovation.org.
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